BEFORE: I was out late last night, though not as late as I could have been - the event I worked ended around 9:30, but I was on tent duty, which meant that somebody had to stick around and hold down the fort while the workmen took down the press tent and the Will Call tent and the COVID testing tent. I figure if somebody's going to earn those hours, it might as well be me - so I've fostered a reputation for taking the late shifts, the somewhat undesirable shifts, and covering shifts when somebody else suddenly can't make it. It's part of my clever plan to masquerade as a responsible adult, while making a little extra money on the side - it's working, I seemed to have fooled the people who make up the schedule. If you say "Yes" enough times, they come to rely on you when there's a need. (Insert evil genius laugh here.)
It's St. Patrick's Day, but I've got nothing special planned, just a morning doctor's appointment because my annual physical is overdue, then the weather's pretty crappy so I plan to go back to bed when I get back home in the late morning. Catching up on some sleep is definitely first priority today, then movie, then TV. Wait, I've got some phone calls to make to try to disconnect my parents' cable next week, so that, then TV. Oh, and the chip on my credit card has sort of started to stop working, so cable, credit card, then TV.
Here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, Friday, March 18 - back to the 1970's:
8:00 am "Butterflies Are Free" (1972)
10:00 am "Travels With My Aunt" (1972)
12:00 pm "A Little Romance" (1979)
2:00 pm "California Suite" (1978)
4:00 pm "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)
6:00 pm "The Sunshine Boys" (1975)
8:00 pm "Annie Hall" (1977)
9:45 pm "Shampoo" (1975)
11:45 pm "The Sting" (1973)
2:15 am "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975)
4:30 am "Shaft" (1971)
Blythe Danner carries over from "The Love Letter". She was around in the 1970's, but not in any of the movies TCM is showing today. Anyway, I've seen 8 out of 11, which for me is really good - I have not seen "Travels With My Aunt", "A Little Romance" or the original "Shaft", but I've seen the sequel/reboots. I'm up to 83 seen out of 198, which is 41.9%. The movies can't all be from the 1970's and 1980's, unfortunately.
THE PLOT: Ed spends his life preparing for a disaster that may never come. Ronnie spends her life shopping for things she may never use. These two people will try to find love.
AFTER: It's a cute little movie, I suppose - about as cute as one can expect with lead characters who are both damaged, but in different ways. It turns out that a doomsday and a prepper are essentially different people, though they're both collecting too many things, it's for entirely different reasons. A prepper believes that bad times are ahead, and it's best to be prepared for them, it's someone with low expectations or some kind of grudge with the world around them, and they believe that things are only going to get worse in the future. A hoarder, however, may not have a reason for collecting things, or they may not even be aware of what they're doing or why, and they may have suffered through some trauma such as the death of a loved one, and this is their response, to shut down emotionally and live only for the thrill of acquiring more. What they share in common is that more will never be enough for them, but the prepper's likely to be much more organized about it, he knows exactly how many supplies he needs for a certain length of time, and he buys and stores according to a set of rules. It's OCD vs DCD - organized compulsive disorder vs. disorganized.
Can these two find some kind of happiness together? I don't know, can a prepper be happy about anything, except watching the world burn and being proven right? I really don't know much about the prepper lifestyle, but I know plenty about hoarding - my parents hated to throw anything away, and several times as an adult I've had to clean out their basement or their garage and make choices for them about what to keep and what to get rid of, because they would always choose "keep". One time when I finally got the garage empty enough to put their car in it, I had to take a picture of that, because I doubted I would ever see that happen again, and I was right. Now they've moved out of the house, but their stuff is all still there, and at some point in the future my sister and I are going to have to go up there, take a look at everything in that house, and make some decisions about what to do with it all. That could take months, and it's time we don't really have, we have our own lives to lead. So maybe it's better to just hire someone to clean the whole place out, after I remove a few boxes of personal stuff that I have in their basement. I suppose this is all a problem for another day.
In the film, Ed mistakes Ronnie for a fellow prepper because of the choices she makes in the grocery store - I'm not sure what exactly she bought that led his mind in this direction, but apparently canned tuna is big with the preppers, maybe that was it. On their dates he asks her questions about the tuna, which brand of toilet paper she buys, you know, the important stuff. Hey, remember two years ago when everybody was stocking up on toilet paper? I was in a grocery store when that started to happen, it was like a wave of madness that swept over the crowd, people must have seen toilet paper in someone else's cart and thought, "Oh, of course, lockdown is starting and I'm going to be at home more, so I need this." Now that problem got solved eventually by Amazon and other home delivery services, but we still have supply chain problems that are persisting, so we're still not back to normal yet, maybe we'll never get back to the old normal and we'll have to settle for the new normal. Look, I know it's not over yet, but most of New York State is colored green on the map now, that's much better than red, and we're planning a drive up to Massachusetts, maybe even Atlantic City next month.
When you've lived for any length of time under adverse conditions, it can be tough to try to enjoy yourself again. Whatever coping mechanisms you put in place were there for a reason, to help you get through a day and on to the next one, but if they're in place for too long then you may come to depend on them, and you may not feel like you can live without them. That's certainly the case for our lead characters today - they do what they do because they've been doing that, and it's kept them focused on something besides the inevitable end that awaits us all. But then you meet a fellow "traveler" on Spaceship Earth and maybe you see things from a different perspective, or you have to explain yourself to that person and maybe things don't make the same sense any more than they used to. Times change, our circumstances change and then we have to change with them or we get left behind.
Look, it sucks to be on the "wrong side of 60", as it's described in this movie. Hell, it sucks to be on the wrong side of 50, I can confirm that - but Ronnie, the optimist declares "There's no wrong side of 60!" and maybe she's also correct. You're as old as you are, so you might as well make the best out of whatever age that is. You can waste a day if you want to sleep a bit in the afternoon or you're not up to leaving the house today, just don't waste too many days, or you might waste all of them. And don't spend your time stockpiling food that you're not going to eat, there's no point in that - or, is there? I watched a similar plot-line unfold during a season of "Joe Pera Talks With You", where Joe dated a fellow teacher who turned out to be a prepper. Me, I'm for eating all of the food I buy, because I simply hate to throw anything away, even if it's spoiled. If it's moldy, I know I'm saving my own life by throwing that food away, but I still feel bad about it. Hoarding is for comic books, movies and collectibles, not for food, but I realize this is a policy that I may regret when the zombie apocalypse starts to happen.
Also starring John Lithgow (last seen in "Bombshell"), Derek Cecil (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Katie Aselton (last seen in "Father Figures"), Sophie Thatcher, Eve Harlow (last seen in "Instant Family"), Wendy Makkena (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Isabelle Boni, Jeff Moon, Tyler Aser.
RATING: 5 out of 10 cans of Campbell's soup
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